Fusing Sales and Service with HPE Pointnext Services and ‘Digital Next Advisory'

[Dave_Strong]

The last couple of years have seen HPE work to create a single technical sales community, and any organisation engaging with us is likely to encounter this fusion of sales and services support from the very start. Acting as one community has proven benefits for our customers, especially when looking to keep pace with, or lead, their industries. Digital transformation is a huge and ongoing area of development for every organisation, and without the correct skills and guidance, some find it difficult to gain the most value from their rich hardware and software portfolio. In a similar way, we recognise the importance of providing the cutting edge technical offerings that make HPE unique within the marketplace.

Expertise, advice and guidance

HPE Pointnext Services hold expertise to drive digital transformation, with specialists in a range of fields on hand to guide organisations. This blend of sales and services support is successful because of the people behind it, their experience, and how the teams work together. We caught up with two of our colleagues to see how their experience combines to provide a unique service:

Jason Smith is a Chief Technologist at HPE, having spent many years in a number of roles. The latest of these is working with Tony Clement, Strategic Adviser with HPE Pointnext Services. Jason and Tony collaborate on the same engagements today more than ever.

Tony: “My first IT job was on Long Island back in 1984, programming in dBase II and using WordStar as a text editor in PC DOS. Jump to 1993 in LA, and I find myself as a systems integrator Business Unit Manager for a major aerospace firm, surrounded by the hype of the internet, and everyone talking about ‘WWW’. 1997 through to 2011 saw me work with some start-ups and the first whisperings of the dawn of public cloud, with the explosion of cloud services – public, community, private and hybrid – pushing me into a Principal Consultant role in London with a global telco in 2015. With most of the world remaining on-premises in their own data centres, I saw the wild rush to the cloud in full swing, with the start-ups and green fields eager to lead the pack.

“I landed in my current role as Strategic Adviser for HPE Pointnext Services in 2018, having witnessed a vast array of patterns and anti-patterns in digital transformation across many organisations and industries. It is evident that we will see a post-pandemic acceleration in digital transformation as organisations attempt to compete digitally to maintain their foothold in the marketplace, and it is crucial that there is holistic support across both sales and services to assist in mapping an organisation’s digital journey and identifying the next steps in their digital transformation journey. That’s where our wealth of experience and skills really comes into its own.”

Jason: “The complete opposite to Tony, I am a long-term HPE recruit, and HP prior to that! I started in BCS compute, and looking back, the key battlegrounds were ‘speeds and feeds’ and also who’s platform does the application run on? From there, my journey took me into the Industry Standard Servers (ISS) world, just as C-Class blades launched. With a good understanding of both Blade servers and ISS, I found myself working with a new product – CloudSystem. Years previous, the word ‘cloud’ had seemed fanciful and far off, but it arrived with huge impact. A cloud business unit was formed and I focused purely on cloud technologies, with a vision of a hybrid cloud world, that all these years later, seems to have been correct!

“It was here that we forged the importance of getting the ‘right mix’ when it comes to cloud, ensuring that workloads resided where they were best suited – public cloud, private cloud, other data centres or co-located. Conversations with customers started to become much more strategic, rather than solely technical, with longer-term strategies rising in importance.

“As a Chief Technologist, I work hand in hand with our HPE Pointnext Services, who have grasped the ‘right mix’ concept and run with it when working with all our customers to find their own ‘right mix’. Identifying which of their workloads should reside where and why and then helping them to actually perform the migrations, HPE Pointnext Services help to accelerate digital transformation; to ensure each organisation’s IT environment is suitable for now as well as the future and is ‘cloud appropriate’, rather than taking a ‘cloud-first’ approach.”

A unified approach

Despite different career paths, Tony and Jason equally agree that HPE’s approach to accelerating digital transformation is of huge benefit to customers. This blends experience, understanding and initiative to spot where HPE expertise can enhance the chances of success, and highlights areas that the customer may have overlooked.

Digital Next Advisory (DNA) is an approach that HPE Pointnext Services takes to accelerate digital transformation. With 70% of digital transformation programmes stalling, it is crucial that organisations are guided through the process with tailormade support. DNA draws together all the expertise of the HPE organisation from the services and technology point of view and maps out an approach unique to each customer that takes into account their priorities, their market and their own corporate goals.

HPE is running two sessions as part of HPE Discover 2021, to demonstrate the value in taking the DNA approach. These virtual experiences will help organisations identify barriers to their digital transformation, highlight opportunities and show how HPE’s Digital Advisors can help.

If you’d like to find out more, or book a space in one of the workshops, click here:

https://content.attend.hpe.com/go/virtualplatform.details/?l=1045&SID=24378&schid=9765&locale=en_US

https://content.attend.hpe.com/go/virtualplatform.details/?l=1045&SID=24378&schid=9766&locale=en_US

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Dave Strong
Hewlett Packard Enterprise

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